FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Next Big Thing - A PREDICTION

Rant Number 447 6 July 2011

Poverty to worsen in Welsh valleys! Desperate jobseekers! Public sector squeezes drains people of hope! Students in debt! And so on. Not just in Wales but in Britain as a whole. And it is going to get worse.

Doom and gloom are all around in the Britain that was once great. But the priest has the brightest of all bright ideas. I know how to fix poverty, unemployment, student debt, joblessness, the lot. The next big idea – I have got it!

Insight flashed from a pellucid paragraph in Anthony Daniels’ brisk Zanzibar to Timbuktu. A man in the Nigerian state of Sokoto was arrested for trying ‘to sell his son to another man’. Don’t rush to condemn the fellow: it was a time of economic hardship, you see?

The penny dropped. That’s it! That nifty Nigerian guy, unjustly apprehended by the benighted authorities, blazed a trail. The unemployed, the poor, the debt-laden students now can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. Snap out of despondency! How? Have a child and sell it. Or two children. Or three. More cash to be made. Excellent. A burgeoning industry beckons. Profits. Enlightened self-interest. Happiness maximised. Superb! This is going to be big, real big, man!

Necessity is the mother of inventions. Child-selling is not new. The comprachicos in Victor Hugo’s The Laughing Man are a case in point. OK, that was three centuries ago. But Curzio Malaparte’s fact-based novel, The Skin, harks back to 1944. Set in Naples after the ‘Liberation’, it shows the utter misery and degradation in which the Neapolitans had fallen because of the war. Malaparte narrates how wretched, starving mothers were reduced to selling their young children for a pittance to the Moroccan soldiers in the French Army. For purposes perhaps less than paternal. An extreme, lamentable case. But there is no need for things to get so dire. Child-selling can be done properly, decently and in order. As a fair business transaction. On e-Bay. And Facebook. You can tweet it. Put an ad in the papers – if you are really old-fashioned. Regardless, you can make money – we are, after all, a capitalist society. Built on buying and selling. Why should only the bloody bankers get all the lolly? Let little people make a bit of cash, for goodness’ sake! The seller sells and the buyer buys and gets what he wants.

The child....hmmm, let me figure that out.

A child’s best interest...Why wouldn’t that be served by being given to another man, or woman? So long as they are, as they say, caring...Biological parenthood is considered old fashioned, anyway. A Times editorial yesterday attacked the superstition of the ‘preservation of the biological family’. ‘Pink parents’ (gays) are spreading, anyway. ‘Social’ parenting can work out best in adoption, so, what’s so wrong about selling and buying a child, eh?

It would be illegal, yes. But that’s no ultimate bar, surely. Many things were once illegal and they no longer are. Abortion was illegal – now no more. Ditto with same sex unions. Good. People progress. Evolve. Improve. In time, shortly, people will come to see the virtue, the utility, I daresay the beauty of the next big thing – child selling.

Human Rights activists would make trouble, I figure. But look here. The HR industry does not object to abortion, does it? That is kosher in their book. It is all right to terminate a life in the womb, right? But would it not be better to let that child be born? To give that live being a chance of a better life with prosperous parents? If the foetus could be asked, do you not think it would prefer to live, rather than to die? Wouldn’t you?

Bertrand Russell once said he never understood the argument that it is better to exist than not to exist. I wonder. Soon science might be able to make contact with the baby in the womb. Ask him – in the appropriate, instinctive, sub-rational ways – whether he prefers life to death. Methinks the tiny thing might well opt for living, pace philosophy.

189.100 babies were ‘terminated’ in 2009. They were, presumably, unwanted. But, if the mother had realised she could make some cash out of the little blighter, might she not have had an incentive to make him live?

Today the State and our fiendish, PC Local Authorities have a monopoly on things like adoption. They also grab vulnerable children away from families deemed unsuitable. Dogmatically determine, on racial grounds, whether blacks can adopt whites or the other way around. This is intolerable, totalitarian and racist. Let private enterprise regulate matters, instead of a clapped out, discredited public sector. If you can sell a cat or a puppy, why not your child? They are all yours. Private property is a fundamental right of man, as John Locke stipulated. Private enterprise is the key to a nation’s wealth. People are essentially buyers and consumers, so let us sell and buy children, too. Verily, this will be the Next Big Thing.

Prejudice of course will raise its ugly head. Like in Michel Houellebecq’s visionary novel, Platform. The controversial, Islam-hating French writer postulates the creation of Aphrodite Clubs. Basically, offering sex-based travel tours to the Third...oops! I mean, the developing world. With the best of intentions. It happens already, anyway, but hypocritically hidden. The idea, again, is to encourage private enterprise, relieve poverty, maximise people’s felicity. Feminism and women’s rights have made many European men miserable. The exotic East offers an inexhaustible reservoir of tame, domesticated females. Would make ideal wives and lovers. And the birds, of both sexes, hanker after life in Europe, a promised land of milk and honey to them. So...why not?

Alas, bourgeois prejudice (and terrorism) spoils it all. People are not ready, yet. But, in the case of child-selling I have no doubt its time will, must come. It is an empirical thing. Poverty and unemployment are not going to go away – no government, of whatever hue, can solve them. Only the people concerned can. In this simple, sensible and rational way.

I hear the cacophonies of protest. Disgusting! Immoral! Illegal! The priest answers: today, perhaps. But, again, society evolves. And the law changes. Empiricism and pragmatism must guide us, not outdated, primitive notions of obligation, natural attachments and the like. A brave new world beckons. And money, money, money galore! Child-selling will be the Next Big Thing!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli